The Detroit Partnership: Motor City’s Mafia

The Detroit mob called itself “the Partnership” — an explicit joint venture between an Italian-American crime family and the Jewish-American criminal organization that had developed alongside it since Prohibition. The Detroit Partnership maintained this structure across multiple generations of leadership, producing a criminal organization that was less well-documented than its New York and Chicago counterparts but that controlled a mid-sized industrial city’s criminal economy for more than half a century.^1^

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Detroit’s Prohibition River Made Everything Possible

Detroit’s position on the Detroit River, directly across from Windsor, Ontario — where Canadian whiskey was legal and available — made it one of the most important bootlegging corridors in the United States. The river crossing from Windsor to Detroit generated an estimated $215 million annually at its peak in the late 1920s, and the criminal organizations that controlled it accumulated capital and infrastructure that outlasted Prohibition by decades.^1^

The Purple Gang, predominantly Jewish American and drawn from the Maxwell Street immigrant neighborhood, controlled rum-running across the Detroit River and extorted independent bootleggers throughout the city during the 1920s. Their reputation for violence was such that Al Capone’s Chicago organization paid them tribute rather than challenge their control of the river crossing. By the early 1930s, the Purple Gang had been substantially neutralized through internal conflict and law enforcement pressure, and the Italian-American Tocco-Zerilli organization — organized around Joseph Zerilli and William “Black Bill” Tocco — assumed dominant position. The Partnership that emerged was a practical arrangement between what remained of the Jewish criminal networks and the Italian-American family, sharing territories and revenues rather than fighting over them. The specific terms varied over time, but the basic structure — cooperation rather than competition — persisted through the 1970s.

Zerilli’s Four Decades Proved That Obscurity Is a Strategy

Joseph Zerilli became boss of the Detroit family in the 1930s and held that position until his death in 1977 — alongside Tony Accardo in Chicago, one of the longest-serving organized crime bosses in American history. His longevity was a product of the same qualities that characterized other long-term leaders: he was willing to delegate, avoided unnecessary publicity, maintained good relations with the New York Commission, and used violence judiciously rather than reflexively.

The Detroit family’s revenue base was anchored in labor racketeering in the auto industry and related manufacturing sectors. Detroit in the 1940s and 1950s was one of the wealthiest industrial cities in the world, and the labor contracts negotiated in the auto industry moved enormous sums. The family’s penetration of specific union locals — not the United Auto Workers itself, which was too large and too political to control, but smaller crafts unions and local organizations — provided a steady revenue stream through corruption of contract processes and extortion of contractors.^1^

The family also maintained gambling operations throughout the Detroit metropolitan area and had interests in Las Vegas casino financing through the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund, coordinated with the Chicago Outfit and other Midwest families. The Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, which opened in 1966, involved Detroit family money in its financing and produced skim revenue shared among several Midwest organizations.

Did the Detroit Family Kill Jimmy Hoffa?

Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters president whose relationship with organized crime was among the worst-kept secrets in American labor history, had particularly close ties to the Detroit family. Hoffa’s power base was Detroit — he had risen through Teamsters Local 299, which organized Detroit-area drivers — and his relationship with Zerilli and other Detroit family figures dated from the early stages of his career. The Central States Pension Fund, which Hoffa controlled and which became the financing vehicle for organized crime’s Las Vegas investments, was the concrete expression of that relationship.^1^

Hoffa disappeared on July 30, 1975, from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, a Detroit suburb. He was scheduled to meet with two organized crime figures — Anthony Giacalone of the Detroit family and Anthony Provenzano of the Genovese family’s New Jersey faction — and was last seen alive in that parking lot. His body was never found. No one has been convicted of his murder, though the FBI’s investigation produced extensive evidence pointing to involvement by Detroit family associates. Rumors about the disposal of his remains — a New Jersey landfill, the foundations of a building, a rendering plant — have never been confirmed.

The Detroit Family Faded Before It Fell

The Detroit family after Zerilli’s 1977 death was led by his son Anthony Zerilli and Jack Tocco, William’s son, maintaining the family structure across generations. The FBI’s organized crime investigations in the 1980s and 1990s produced RICO prosecutions that convicted Jack Tocco in 1998 on racketeering charges, though his sentence was relatively light — eighteen months — reflecting his age and the strength of the defense case. He died in 2014.^1^

By the 2010s, the Detroit family was assessed by the FBI as significantly reduced from its peak, with remaining operations concentrated in gambling and extortion in the Detroit metropolitan area. The collapse of Detroit’s auto industry and the resulting economic devastation of the city reduced the criminal economy available to it. The labor racketeering base that had sustained the family for decades contracted with the industries it had exploited.

The Detroit Partnership’s relative obscurity in the organized crime narrative reflects its success at the one thing that guaranteed survival: not being famous. It ran a profitable criminal enterprise for decades in one of America’s major industrial cities, generated none of the tabloid notoriety that destroyed more prominent organizations, and faded gradually rather than collapsing spectacularly. That’s a different kind of story from Gotti or Nicky Scarfo or Al Capone, but it’s the one that actually lasted.

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Sources:

1. Scott Burnstein. Motor City Mafia: A Century of Organized Crime in Detroit. Arcadia Publishing, 2006.
2. Brill, Steven. The Teamsters. Simon & Schuster, 1978.
3. Moldea, Dan E. The Hoffa Wars: Teamsters, Rebels, Politicians, and the Mob. Paddington Press, 1978.
4. Raab, Selwyn. Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires. St. Martin’s Press, 2005.